


Now Your Mess Is Mine

by livia_1291



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Canon Divergent, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, I based this on the Netflix series castlevania, Kinda Fluffy, Makeouts, adora - Freeform, adora is alucard, and bow and glimmer are speakers, based on art, caspopvania au, catra - Freeform, catra is a belmont, catradora, dealing with the aftermath of castlevania season 2, did i watch castlevania for the sole purpose of writing this au?, i am a productive member of society, it's by cruxbatface on twitter, i’ve never played the games, kinda angsty, not my concept!!, pls excuse any shortcomings!, pls go look at the art that inspired this!, some strong language, spop, yes i did
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25386484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livia_1291/pseuds/livia_1291
Summary: Catra and Adora find purpose (and each other) in the rubble of their childhood homes.A plotless little fic set in cruxbatface's caspopvania AU, with Adora as Alucard, Catra as a Belmont, and Bow and Glimmer as speakers. Title is from a Vance Joy song.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 90





	Now Your Mess Is Mine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CruxBatface](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CruxBatface/gifts).



One week.

It had only been one week since Adora, Catra, Glimmer, and Bow had managed to slay Dracula and restore peace to the cities of Wallachia.

It hadn’t been easy. One by one, the lord of shadow overpowered them in the dim halls of his trapped castle. With unnatural speed, he dodged Glimmer and Bow’s magic attacks, clawing Glimmer’s bicep raw and sending Bow running after her. Catra had cracked the Morningstar whip, striking him square in the chest with the glowing flail. By all means, the blow should have killed him - it would have killed any other vampire - but as he proclaimed as he rose from the red-carpeted floor, _“I am no ordinary vampire.”_

It was Adora who killed him. In the back of her mind, Catra always knew it would be. It _had_ to be. It felt wrong to ask exactly _what_ had happened, but from what she could piece together, Adora and her father had fought all the way to her childhood bedroom, where he had had some sort of break, and she had stabbed him in the heart with a piece of her wooden bedpost. Catra, Glimmer, and Bow had rushed in too late to do anything other than watch as the terror of Wallachia crumbled to dust at his only daughter’s hands. Catra had reached out to Adora, guiding her away from the burned spot on the floor where her father had lain, and pretended not to notice the way Adora’s whole body was shaking. (She didn’t think she would appreciate that very much.)

 _One week. It feels like it’s been months,_ Catra thought, licking her dry lips as she brushed dust from the black leather spine of a book that probably hadn’t been touched since it was tucked into the dark sepulcher of the Belmont Hold decades ago. The scabbed-over wounds still healing on her cheek and side served as aching reminders that it hadn’t really been all that long.

Once the deed was done, Bow and Glimmer had hitched up a wagon and hurried back to join their train, eager to pass on the epic story of the struggle for the soul of Wallachia. Catra and Adora supplied them with far too many provisions for just the two of them and waved them goodbye, accepting their promises to return soon before turning back to the castle and the sinkhole that led to the destroyed Belmont Hold. There was much work to be done.

After a brief conversation over some good dried beef and tankards of sweet amber ale from the castle cellars, Catra and Adora agreed that Dracula’s castle and the Belmont Hold should be repaired and repurposed as institutes of learning. There was far too much knowledge contained in both places to be destroyed, and as Adora admitted, it was what her mother would have wanted. Together, they set about preserving the libraries, the materials, and the magic left in the ruins, facilitating the joining of their families for the good of humanity. 

It was slow work. The careful organization of the Belmont Hold had been undone by the horde of beasts that had crashed in on them while they searched for clues. Papers lay strewn across the blood-stained wooden floor, and broken glass and piles of books littered dark corners and walkways. It was, as Catra had lamented, “an absolute fucking mess.” Adora had responded to her amateur dramatics by shooting her a look, taking her by the wrist, and telling her she’d better get to work.

Adora was an interesting conundrum to consider, a cold spot in the otherwise warm room. Catra set aside the stack of papers she’d been half-heartedly reorganizing by page number to watch her, mesmerized by the easy grace in her movements. The _dhampir_ glided effortlessly through the wrecked stacks of the Belmont Hold, repairing broken shelves and listening as Catra filled the dusty silence with stories of hiding in between the bookcases as a little girl to avoid sparring lessons with her father, or overly-aggressive hair brushings from her mother. 

Catra rocked back on her heels and brushed the end of her tail over the top of a stack of heavy volumes written by some likely long-dead author called Entrapta, sending dust motes floating into the lamplight. Honestly, it wasn’t her fault for staring. Not when Adora was so much more interesting that the work laid out in front of her.

She was undeniably beautiful, with sharp golden eyes and hair that fell like liquid sunlight over the slopes of her shoulders. It was almost ironic, Catra thought, that she seemed to be made of light. Adora was, as the lingering soreness at the crook of her neck reminded her, a creature of the night.

 _The tragic princess_ , the villagers had called her, whispering it in tandem with her name that was not a name, and skittering back like frightened rats when she swept past, as though her presence might doom them the same way her father’s had. _Alucard_ , they would hiss. Catra wrinkled her nose in distaste; that moniker never sat quite right with her. Adora had proved that she was more than a mirror image of her father, and her name deserved to reflect that.

And yet, there was something to the name. If Dracula’s sadness was like fire, red-hot and full of hell’s all-consuming rage, then Adora’s was the opposite. Her grief was a lake in the dead of winter, frigid and deep and still. This mission had been a job to her, something that had to happen for the greater good of their nation and for the memory of her beloved mother. She derived no joy from any of it.

A snap of elegant gloved fingers jolted Catra from her reverie. Adora was watching her from her spot on the floor, one brow arched in a curious question and fingers poised to snap again, sharp and clear despite the cloth covering them.

“Are you going to finish sorting those, or are you just going to stare at me all day?” The question was not spoken unkindly, but it still made Catra’s cheeks flush redder than the poppies peeking through the wet spring earth outside. _I have got to learn to be more subtle._

“Sorry,” she murmured. After a moment’s hesitation, she padded across the floor, dodging bits of broken bottles and the shattered remains of what looked to have been a bleached harpy skull. Adora moved aside to allow Catra to sit on the ground next to her, where she rested her back against a burned-out portrait of some long-dead relative. “Something’s bothering you.”

“Astute as ever, Belmont,” sighed Adora, but there was little humor in the honey richness of her voice. 

“What is it?” Catra urged, angling herself to meet Adora’s evasive gaze. In the warm light of the strategically-placed lamps, she could count the little flecks of sapphire blue in the margins of the other woman’s irises, belying her quasi-humanity.

“Catra, I just killed my father in my childhood bedroom.”

“Oh. Yeah. That.”

“Sometimes I wonder…” she began, absently tracing a gloved fingertip over the top of her thigh, “I wonder if it might have been better for me to die with him.”

There was a beat of silence while those words hung in the air between them, heavy and solid. Yet again, Adora was refusing to meet Catra’s gaze, even though she could feel it burning at her neck, insistent and stunned. What was she supposed to tell her? That she hated being alone in that old castle? That she dreamed of ghosts? That when she was alone, she wept for all that was, and all that wasn’t?

“What the hell are you talking about?” Catra was still staring at her, mismatched eyes wide with shock and the beginnings of anger. “Adora, you _cannot_ be serious right now.”

 _Adora_. Catra called her Adora, never Alucard. Catra saw her for _who_ she was, not _what_ she was. Catra, the last daughter of a warrior dynasty, who had lost everything and yet still lived to spit the jewel-bright blood from her mouth and crack her whip. Catra, who had looked straight into Adora’s desperate, hungry eyes all those months ago and still had the guts to kiss her way out of an impossible situation. Catra, who had moved to kneel in front of Adora and grasp at her wrists, pulling off her gloves so that their hands rested palm-to-palm.

 _Take off your gloves when you touch me,_ Catra had demanded the first time Adora had pressed her into a mattress and reached for the hem of her cropped shirt, _I want to feel you_. Indeed, there was something wholly soothing and grounding about the feeling of warm hands pressed against hers, and Adora took a shuddering breath, finally lifting her golden eyes to meet Catra’s.

“This is _our_ home now,” Catra said, voice low with a fierce sort of decisiveness that made Adora want to grab her and pull her in close, “ _not_ your grave. And we’re going to make more out of it than a pile of ruins and a symbol of terror. You have to live for that. You have to live for...for… What am I going to tell Bow and Glimmer when they come back and you’re gone?”

That wasn’t what she had meant to say, but she still wasn’t ready to admit that Adora was so much more to her than a great lay and a good friend. Not out loud, at least.

“I don’t know. This is a mess,” sighed Adora, her soft exhale fanning out across the fine fur at Catra’s jaw. Gently, Catra lifted a hand to cup Adora’s face, skimming her thumb across the smooth plane of a pale cheek. Her other hand clasped her companion’s, intertwining their fingers so that the heat from her palm seeped into Adora’s cool skin.

_What’s yours is mine._

“Yeah,” she agreed, “but it’s our mess. You’re not doing this alone, remember?”

“Bel- _Catra_ ,” Adora murmured, and Catra flashed her a half-smile, wiping the beginnings of tears from the corners of her companion’s eyes with the pad of her thumb and taking care not to scratch the tender skin with her claws. 

“Hey, I thought you were supposed to cry blood or something,” she teased, and despite her grief, Adora laughed, pulling Catra into her lap and leaning down to rest her forehead against hers. Their tiaras brushed together, and Catra reached up to remove them both, resting them on a half-sorted stack of books. The burdens of their families had no place in this warm, soft space between them. This was a thing reserved for Adora and Catra, not Alucard and Belmont.

“You’re an idiot, Catra,” she whispered. “A brave, stupid, perf- _mmh.”_

Not for the first time, Adora found herself caught off-guard by Catra’s lips against hers, and it took her a moment to remember how to think, and another still to wind her arm around Catra’s hips and forget. Kissing Catra wasn’t an unfamiliar thing, but this time, there was a slowness, a tenderness that left Adora trembling. Catra took her sweet time making sure that Adora would be feeling the aftermath of her touch for days, a burning reminder that she wasn’t alone. Not yet, at least.

Catra Belmont was human. Adora could feel her heartbeat fluttering against her ribs, could taste the searing warmth of her body, could hear the rush of her blood through her veins, all unmistakable reminders of her life. If Catra was lucky, she would grow old. Adora wouldn’t. Someday, Catra would die, and Adora would have to face the deep, dark world alone. Forever wasn’t in the cards for them.

_You’re going to break my heart, and I’m going to let you._

But that had not happened yet. Right now, Catra was here, in Adora’s lap, reminding her with insistent little gasps and sinful wriggling that she was still _very much alive_.

 _Be where you are,_ Glimmer had admonished her once, waving her hand to relight the campfire that had gone out between them, _the past is gone and the future hasn’t happened yet._

Adora indulged herself, nipping at Catra’s lower lip with inhumanly sharp teeth and humming in her throat when she tasted blood, sweet and viscous. She fought not to lose herself when Catra dug her claws into her back and gasped _“more._ ” If heartbreak was the price to pay for this, it would have been worth it.

_I’d face a millennium of darkness for a year with you._

When they finally broke apart, breathless and dazed, Catra licked the metallic tang of her own blood from her lips and dropped her hand from Adora’s cheek to her shoulder.

“How’s that for a reason to keep living?” She grinned, and the curve of Adora’s fond smile was the finest answer she could have hoped for. With utmost care, the _dhampir_ unfastened the golden wing pin from her belt, and pinned it to Catra’s uniform, just above her heart: a promise left unspoken.

“It’ll do, Belmont. It’ll do.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Hi friends!
> 
> Sorry about the lack of updates/new content as of late. I've been trying to keep myself from dying of heat until I can go back to Canada. Honestly, I feel like I live a double life - one in the north, and one in the south.
> 
> I watched all of Castlevania on Netflix just to write this quick little story, which takes place in cruxbatface's amazing caspopvania AU. This is unofficially dedicated to them since I don’t know if they have an ao3, haha. You can find the art and comics they've made for it on their twitter: https://twitter.com/cruxbatface?lang=en. I notably do not have twitter, but their art has tempted me! Go support them if you've got twitter.
> 
> I'll probably write the next chapter of my western AU soon-ish, and if you're here because you want to know if I'm still writing for SSSS, I am! I've got a short fic planned that I want out before I start the next bigger piece. If you're here because you followed me for my linguistics stuff and clicked on this out of curiosity, I'm so sorry.
> 
> S/o to my friends who made sure that the word dhampir was used correctly!
> 
> I hope you're all well!
> 
> xx.
> 
> Liv


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